Has it ever dawned upon you that through the course of your education , the word top school papers or top school has been mentioned and repeated countless times by students, parents and teachers?
The reason why I wanted to bring this out was because I was brought up in Australia and I studied in a government school (Rossmoyne Primary school) where I received 7 years of education there. It was only until I turned 12 that my parents felt that it would be better to emigrate to Singapore. I was automatically enrolled in Raffles Girls School primary (top school) as everyone calls it during those days where I spent the next 10 months preparing for the psle exams, something which appeared very foreign to me at that time.
The main point of my discussion is this interesting fact in which in Singapore, where schools are stereotyped in the positive or negative sense through the use of these terms such as top-school and neighbourhood school. Well at least in the humble city where I stayed (Perth), I dare say that such a stereotype is not reflected through the labelling given to schools.Even in other cities in Australia, schools are not labelled based on students' academic performances. Likewise in Britiain l schools are either government-aided or private. Government schools simply means that the government gives a certain money to fund the programmes and the maintenance of the schools. Of course, this is not to deny that there are no stereotypes given to government and private schools. It is generally acknowledged that students who study in private schools come from a relatively wealthy family compared to those who study in a government -aided school.Likewise if you think about boarding schools in Britian, one can imagine the immense amount of school fees one would have to pay just to stay and study there. My parents did consider sending me to a boarding school in Britain but later decided to change their mind because school fees were so expensive. Anyway, I soon learnt about this distinction between a top-school and a neighbourhood school in Singapore where their literal meanings have been extended to denote other aspects such as physical, behavioral, intellectual etc.
In most Western contexts, a neighbourhood school is a school that is not very far from where you stay. So for my case, I would say that I study in a government-aided neighbourhood school since going to school is only a stone's throw away from my house.
Macmillan dictionary gives the definiton of neighbourhood as
1. people living near each other: people who live near each other or in a specific neighborhood
2.vicinity: the general vicinity or surrounding area of a place
In general, the idea of neighbourhood encompasses the idea of proximity. Proximate to something.
However in the Singaporean context, the meaning of the word neighbourhood has been extended beyond the dictionary's definition. When we talk about neighbourhood school's in Singapore, it appears as if the focus is not so much on the proximity of the school's location to a town or a district. Instead we define and label neighbourhood schools as something undesirable, as a school where students are intellecutally challenged , where academic perfomances are alot more inferior to our top-schools. Our definition of a neighbourhood school also leads us to stereotype students such as their behavior (uncouth, unrefined, rowdy), their inability to excel in the future..etc.

On the flip side of the coin, the ideological notion of a top school is a school which has an excellent reputation of producing students who excel in their studies. Status of these schools are more superior.
All in all, it appears as if the word neighbourhood school, appropriated in our context acts as a pejorative term to label negatively students and the reputation of the school itself. This, for me was something very novel when I first arrived in Singapore and it took me quite a while to get used to this term. = )